Geert Bevin

Passion-driven open-source developer and musician

Profile

Technical skills

Work experience

Senior Developer, Eigenlabs, 2010 - present

Work on the core EigenD system that drives the Eigenharp instruments and provides a high-performance, high-throughput and low latency electronic music performance environment.

This involves a mixture of digital sound generation, high data rate sensor handling, extremely configurable environments, interoperation with existing standards and completely new ways of performing music.

These are some of aspects I worked on:

• Extremely flexible AU/VST/MIDI mapping infrastructure with a GUI matrix to map the three-dimensional per-note expression capabilities of the Eigenharp to the MIDI protocol in various ways.
• The Stage application which provides a fully customisable GUI canvas of widgets that in real time control all aspects of the Eigenharp. The widgets can be targeted for specific devices and are kept in sync across all those that are connected, including iOS devices.
• AU/VST hosting infrastructure, based on the Juce library, with Eigenharp-specific enhancements.
• Expanded the audio capabilities to be multi-channel and accept audio input as well as send audio output.
• Multi-channel streaming audio recorder that has a minimal impact on the real-time performance aspects of the system.
• Open-source developer API with examples to allow the creation of third-party EigenD-specific plugins that have access to the raw hierarchical data and eventing information.
• Fully customisable lighting plugin to change and control the per-key lights on Eigenharps in real time. This also includes a REST API and an easy-to-use Javascript browser GUI for remotely displaying scrolling text banners on the instruments.
• Novel use of playing keys. For instance, the Strummer plugin, which allows one set of keys to act as 'strum' keys for another set of keys that become the strings, indicating the notes to be played. Similar to a guitar, playing techniques such as hammer-on and pulling-off are possible, as well as straightforward strumming. Sounding notes can be muted, and there is support for open strings.
• Integration with third-party hardware like: AudioCubes, thing(1) lights, Control Voltage-based analog synths, iOS synths, ...
• Creation of instrument-specific setups that explore new ways of playing the Eigenharp.
• Advocacy and community building, including conference presentations and trade fair demos.

Senior Developer and Owner, Uwyn, 2002 - present

Uwyn specialises in custom software development, including digital audio software, dynamic web applications, rich internet applications, platform-independent programs and interoperable web-services.

Uwyn also provides digital audio, video and multi-media services.

Some notable examples:

• Invented and implemented native continuations in Java for the RIFE framework through byte-code manipulation. This opened the door for many other dynamic behaviors in other Java frameworks and heralded an era of more nimble and flexible enterprise-level tools as opposed to the rigid and heavy approaches that were the standard before.
• Delivered a top to bottom solution for one of the largest online US retailers, allowing them to create innovative rich media customer interactions from within their familiar content creation tools. This provides exciting new features for tenths of million customers, making their shopping experience more pleasant and engaging while still presenting the information in a clean and elegant way.
• Long-term collaboration with Magnet Magazines (de Persgroep) for the creation, maintenance and development of a modern content-managed website for all their magazines, with a focus on e-commerce and community building.
• Development, support and maintenance for the mobile phone operator Proximus of high-performance modular internet, intranet and extranet customer relation management tools. The solution integrates with the internal business processes and all information is handled and stored in a highly secure manner.
• Analysis and development for Paratel of a platform-independent desktop application for the visual creation of MMS messages with automatic handling of different target phones and size limitations. Through a web-service, customers are able to send their messages in batch after having designed them locally.
• Creation of Bla-bla List, an open-source, secure, simple and sharable to-do list Rich Internet Application. It runs as a Web 2.0 service inside a browser without requiring any installation. Users are able to sign up in a matter of seconds and access their to-do lists from anywhere with internet access.
• Analysis, refactoring and extension for de Persgroep of a custom back-office e-commerce application. It has been dissociated from presentation logic and is provided as a generic service oriented application that can easily be integrated in partner sites.
• Platform-independent fat client creation for Greenpeace Belgium for multi-user contact and customer relationship management. The server-side architecture is service-oriented and fully decoupled.

The details of other projects are available on our company website:

• http://uwyn.com/products
• http://uwyn.com/showcases

Senior Developer, Terracotta, 2007 - 2010

Creation of products and APIs for distributed and clustered Java applications. Development on many aspects of the 'scale continuum' where applications can seamlessly be moved from a single unclustered machine all the way through to a WAN deployment at various partitioning and redundancy levels.

These are some noteworthy aspects I worked on:

• Low-level transparent 'distributed shared object' mechanism through byte-code manipulation and class replacement for Sun JDKs and IBM JDKs.
• Various integration points for a SEDA message-driven asynchronous architecture.
• Real-time on-the-fly distributed statistics gathering system over a custom tunneled JMX protocol, also offering RESTful services with graphical tools.
• General-purpose clustering toolkit as a library as opposed to the relatively invasive Terracotta platform, providing common data structures and coordination tools that can be used directly in any Java application after including a single JAR file.
• Created a reusable Java 2D widget VU meter for real-time monitoring of statistics in Swing applications, this is now used throughout most of the Terracotta developer console.
• Researched, designed, architected and implemented the Ehcache monitoring console, which is a Rich Internet Application that provides an intuitive and user-friendly ExtJS GUI to manage clustered and unclustered caches as well as perform maintenance operations.
• Designed and implemented a cluster-wide asynchronous fault-tolerant processing framework which ensures optimized locality of reference and offers features like work stealing and one and a half phase commit.
• Researched, specified, designed and partly implemented 'Examinator', which is Terracotta's reference application with real-world features and requirements. It combines most de-facto Java frameworks and clusters them using Terracotta products.

CTO, the Leaf, 2001

Company founder and CTO

• Design, analysis and development for Ems-Taxipost of a standalone multi-platform application that allowed customers to easily create, manage and print dispatch notes in a visual and intuitive manner.
• Creation of an automated online contest management and participation tool for l'Echo de la Bourse. Through the website, readers had the opportunity to answer daily and weekly questionnaires. The redaction of l'Echo had access to a complete multi-user role-dependent intranet application for the organization of the event.

Independent developer, 1997 - 2001

Various projects as lead developer, consultant or project manager.

• Analysis and development of a generic solution for Planet Internet to provide back-end features such as automatic page authentication, user and group management, handling of JSP trails and breadcrums, scheduling of maintenance events, fault-tolerant database classes and localization.
• I-Skin was a realtime 3D installation that had been created for the exhibition 'Avignon, ville de beauté'. Visitors immersed themselves in a high-speed tunnel of images and intuitively selected images according to their beauty preferences. Every image had been classified according to its architectural, fashion or body characteristics. During the image selection, these characteristics performed transformations on the basic I-Skin, invoking changes in form, texture, color, transparency and internal structure. At the end, the visitor had created a virtual representation of his/her beauty tendencies and was plunged into the inner structure of his/her personal I-Skin to experience a breathtaking ride through its inner structure, decorated with the selected images.
• DTD design and creation for The Reference of a communication protocol between a WAP gateway and other tiers in a complex architecture involving a leading Belgian bank, database vendor, telecom operator and portable phone manufacturer.

Software developer, Ubiquity, 1998 - 1999

Design and development of numerous internet / intranet database-driven websites and applications.

• 4Catalogs, product catalog management system for print and web use.
• Teamcontrol, nomenclature and role-based intranet access to projects and related files.
• 4Docs, document-based project management with Word and PDF integration and role-based visibility.
• Ubiquity's DHTML company website, using AJAX before the term even existed by loading content asynchronously into layers that were laid out using a custom-built JavaScript layout engine.

Software and internet developer, Full Motion-i, 1997 - 1998

Design and development of internet websites.

Text conversion and encoding migration tool development.

System operator and administrator, Maescopy, 1997

Operation and maintenance of a heterogeneous network (Windows / MacOs / Irix platforms).

Lay-out and desktop publishing.

Sales account manager, Ingram Micro, 1996

Customer technical support and sales.

Open-source and personal projects

Articles and books

Awards

Interviews

Conferences Talks and Presentations

Education

• Mostly self-taught.
• Two years of full-time jazz guitar, singing and theory training Jazz-studio, Antwerp
• Sint-Lucas, Brussel 1st and 2nd year of Architecture
• Jan-Van Ruusbroeckollege, LakenClassical (secondary scientific A) studies
• 7 years of classical music theory and practiceMusic academy, Brussels